Ringing Spring’s Bell for Continued Quaker Resistance

The talk was lively and nonstop, even with breaks. The gathering moved almost seamlessly into broader issue discussion, with resource people as participants, to consider ways to keep moving and build cooperation and momentum.
The Consultation was not aimed at producing resolutions or a new organization, but to assist in encouraging and facilitating cooperation for continued resistance. Encouragement also seemed in plentiful supply, and we closed with some music, from Scott Holmes, who doubles as an aggressive lawyer fighting mass incarceration when he’s not writing songs. He’d written a new resistance song just for us.
Perhaps this model of locally-driven multi-issue and multi-group consultations would be of use to other Meetings. It is neither expensive nor complicated, and the organizing was done by a small cadre of volunteers, using social media as the main means of promotion. And one of its most welcome outcomes was a lift in spirits. We’ll all need more of those; there’s still much to ring the resistance bell about.

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A Quaker Race Riot In Philadelphia?

So will anything come from all this at the PYM session on March 25?

It isn’t supposed to. Such sessions are typically very much scripted and scheduled in advance, with little time or space for anything spontaneous to happen. And the published schedule indicates that there will be some time for questions about the staff changes. This may leave room for some venting. But on the other hand, there have been disruptions at recent PYM sessions, so sometime things don’t go according to plan.

But the changes will not be up for review; wise or not, the General Secretary oversees (sic) the staff, and staffing decisions are her call. And with a legal action in the offing, Duncan-Tessmer has all the more incentive to listen and say little beyond, “Thank thee Friend.”

Yet even if the lid stays on this weekend, these rumblings are signs of a body in significant internal disarray. And frankly, with the burgeoning return of organized, high-power racism (not to mention numerous other plagues) all around it, this turmoil could not come at a more inopportune time.

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“Dilemma for Dr. King” – A 60th Anniversary Review

This is why as the Johnson administration talks of escalating the war beyond 450,000 men, of bombing Hanoi-Haiphong and even of confronting China on the Asian mainland the virtual silence of the unchallenged spokesman of American conscience becomes ever louder and more painful to those who have followed [Dr. King] thus far. The war in Vietnam is perhaps the gravest challenge of Dr. King’s career and conceivably its culmination. Who among us today could blame him if, faced with this dilemma, he agonizes over his course of action? No one, surely; but Martin Luther King, Jr., is not only answerable to us of today: he must walk with history as well. And if in his agony he should fail to act, it must be asked: can history forgive him?

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New Resistance Reading: “Our Society. Our Future: Resist!”

This new collection (now available in paperback and on Kindle) is for those who have been through “a time to lose” — losses that, as I write, are far from over. Some of these losses will have to be endured for a time, perhaps a long time.

Yet if so, they are not to be endured in passive, compliant silence.

These losses will afflict some more, with the weight of an enslaved history on one side, and official bullets on the other. Yet even among those most advantaged, none will escape: the very air that all breathe, the water necessary for all life, are at risk, as well as justice, and what we have known of freedom.

Likewise the ways of resistance are manifold, and guides and programs and checklists for the new waves of resistance strategy are proliferating.

This collection is not meant to add to that burgeoning strategy shelf. After all, no program can fully encompass the resistance. Its scale can include monumental gatherings of hundreds of thousands — even millions. It is also carried on in quiet, solitary acts of defiance. Often these are no more than calm, insistent truth-telling, now an increasingly radical act as lies are embedded in the heart not only of government, but enshrined in the high seats of what is called religion, especially American white Christianity.

Amid this great variety, there are two resources which the resistance handbooks mention, but cannot turn into a formula, namely creativity and imagination. These are weapons more of the weak than the strong, and buckets of money are not enough to quell or substitute for them.

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